Oedipus Complex in Tagore’s ‘Birpurus’ or ‘The Hero’: A Psychoanalytic Reading

Abstract

The Indian poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore has been witnessed to get highly influenced by the western education. Being a world poet, he has never restricted himself to the social and cultural developments of Bengal or India alone, but he has always widened his prospects and tried to investigate the Western art, philosophy, and science and their progress. This has directly impacted his art of characterisation in his literary works especially when was been enlightened by the Freudian psychoanalytical theories. It was probably around the year 1915 when Rabindranath Tagore first came to know about Sigmund Freud and his concept. It can never be confirmed accurately that Tagore and Freud had met with each other physically for a long time, yet from a conversation with Kalidas Nag, one can assume that he suggested about a finding related to Freudian psychoanalysis, though he never mentioned the name of Freud directly or the term ‘unconscious’ which is credited as a concept of Freud. However, while discussing about one of his seminal works Chaturanga [Four parts] (1916), his assertion is presented by Santanu Biswas: